I was listening to Howard Stern interview Zachary Quinto recently. Quinto played Spock in the 2009 Star Trek and also in the 2013 Star Trek Into Darkness. He also came out of the closet in 2011, announcing that he is gay.

I don’t find Quinto particularly interesting, or the fact that he’s gay. What was interesting was the discussion that ensued with Stern about the tendency to not cast gay men into leading man roles. Stern’s a fairly big liberal, so it wasn’t surprising that he thought such a bias unreasonable.

Sticking with the Star Trek theme, let’s think about Captain James T. Kirk, played by William Shatner. The Captain Kirk character is basically a stud, a ladies man, a manly man. He’s not afraid to go after the girl, seduce her, and leave her wanting more. His attraction is so strong that women leave their men for him.

When we watch movies or TV shows, we want to get into the action and identify with the characters. Today they call it “immersive”. We learn to love some characters and hate others. We imagine their pain and revel in their happiness. A successful actor makes their character come to life, and makes them believable. Wouldn’t it have been hard for Shatner to make us believe he was really a studly womanizer if we knew in real life he was gay? In the back of our minds, when Kirk was kissing some woman, we’d know that the Shatner part of him wasn’t enjoying it at all.

Can a gay actor do a good job acting straight? I’m sure he can, just as a straight actor can do a good job acting gay. But if you’re casting someone for a straight leading man, wouldn’t you choose the MOST believable actor to play the part?

Apparently when you can’t compete, you pay people to buy your stuff. According to Forbes.com, Microsoft is going to be offering a minimum of $200 of in-store credit for an iPhone 4S or 5. You’d think a company with deep pockets like MS could come up with something innovative to challenge Apple and Google, but apparently not. Instead they’re just playing catch-up.

Now, can you imagine, if you’re already so paranoid that you suspect a bird of being an agent of the enemy, how badly do you panic when you eventually open the bird up and can’t find anything? Suddenly your sworn foe went from being so clever as to use a bird for a spy mission to being so insanely brilliant as to make the surveillance equipment undetectable? Instead of just being evil, they’re diabolical geniuses?

Apparently no one wants to discuss real issues and differences in ideology between Democrats and Republicans, so we’re going to snipe back and forth about who mistreats dogs more – Mitt Romney or Barack Obama.

Romney had his dog ride in a carrier on top of the car. It’s probably not something I would have done, but it’s important to keep things in perspective. I see so-called “dog-lovers” all the time doing things that put their pets at risk. When you’re driving down the road with Fido on your lap, what’s going to happen when you wreck and your airbag inflates? How will it feel to have dog pancake on your chest?

Obama on the other hand admits to eating dog when he was little. He was in a foreign country and was too young to have any preconceived ideas about whether dogs were acceptable for a main course. Again, it’s important to keep things in perspective. In the USA, most dogs are our pets, and therefore we wouldn’t consider eating them. In a country where dogs are classified more as livestock than pet, the idea of dog meat isn’t any different than beef.

I continue to be deluged with spam comments trying to sell essay writing services. Today’s latest example was for a company at essaysservices dot com. I refuse to post a link to their site.

Here’s an example of the quality of their services:

Do you try to cope a lot of issues at the same time, but, nothing is finished in time? Probably you do something not correctly?

Needless to say, I don’t think English is the native language of the person posting the comment. I’m assuming they are making 5 cents an hour in a third world country somewhere, doing a cut-and-paste of something they probably can’t even read.

The sad thing is, apparently it’s still a money-maker, or these spammers wouldn’t bother to keep doing it. Someone, somewhere, clicks on the link and pays for a crappy essay because they’re too lazy to do their own homework.

Well, tomorrow is the big day where we get to vote for Romney or Santorum. I don’t think I’ve ever taken so many calls before an election as for this one. Most of the calls we’ve gotten have been outright just plugging Santorum. A few have focused on specific issues and have been paid for by outside parties that are, “not for a specific candidate”, but are pitching Santorum hard. I took one call that basically started out like a survey, but once I answered that I was picking Santorum, it launched into a pro-Santorum message. I wish I could have ran through all the different possibilities, because as a sometimes computer programmer I’m curious about the intelligence of the survey.

I’m voting for Santorum tomorrow. The last election was depressing with lukewarm McCain, and I’m not doing that again with Romney. McCain lost because he didn’t give people anything to get excited about. When he picked Palin he caused a buzz, because people liked that she was more conservative than he was. But, it wasn’t enough, especially when he failed to capitalize on the excitement. Moderates liked Obama’s smooth delivery, and didn’t see much contrast between him and McCain. Conservatives were disappointed in McCain’s moderate stances and didn’t work hard to elect him. The result was disaster.

This time I’m hoping we can start with a conservative in Santorum. We need the clear distinction between the liberal entitlement anti-American mentality of the Democrats and the pro-America, responsible, self-sufficiency of conservative Republicans. Romney just wants to tout his business experience and doesn’t want to take any real stands on the issues that people care about. Being pro-business isn’t a powerful issue. Being against abortion, wanting to de-fund the EPA, DOE, Dept of Education…. these are the issues that people are passionate about and will fight for.

Get out and vote tomorrow, fellow conservatives. Hopefully you’ll vote for Rick Santorum.

I’d like to put in a plug for Hillsdale College. Those of you who listen to Mark Levin are already aware of Hillsdale and have undoubtedly been hearing about their free Constitution series. They actually have an Introduction to the Constitution and Constitution 101.

Introduction to the Constitution is a set of 5 videos (originally released as one per week) that gives a high-level explanation of the Declaration of Independence and the U. S. Constitution and how the two documents are related. It’s fairly easy to understand, and my 10-year old was able to comprehend it pretty well. I actually scraped the audio using a Firefox plugin so I could listen to them on my drive to and from work.

The Constitution 101 series has just started to be released this week, and will be one video per week for ten weeks. The focus is on the meaning and history of the U. S. Constitution.

Hillsdale is providing these videos for free, which is really impressive. It shows just how seriously they take this subject. They take donations, of course, and they do not accept any government money. I don’t have the resources to make a large donation, but I did purchase the book to go with the videos. It’s The U. S. Constitution: A Reader, and contains almost 800 pages of source material such as the Federalist Papers.

I highly recommend this series to anyone with a child learning early American history, and really to any U. S. citizen who wants to understand the founding of this country and how our government and society is supposed to work.